The people we love are thieves.They steal our hearts. They steal our breath.They steal our sanity.And we let them.Over and over and over again.

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They say you never forget your first time. Mine was with a homeless musician who effed my brains out under a bridge.

He was my first love. And fourteen years later, I still can’t get him out of my head.

He broke all my rules.He also broke my heart.

I watched him climb to stardom, cheering him on from afar.But I was never a fan; just a girl in love.

Like a tornado, he spiraled, leaving a path of destruction in his wake.

But love conquers all, right? It has to. Because here I stand, ravaged and ruined, needing it to be true.

You can’t go back, but I want to. Back to the bridge. Back to when he sang only for me. Before he was famous. Before he shattered my heart.

I thought I knew everything about him.But I could not have been more wrong.

He promised me every tomorrow. And here I am, waiting. And hoping. Again.

Carian Cole isn’t a new author to me and in my mind, there’s a particular space I have put away for her in my head because of her rather unusual characters and storytelling. ‘No Tomorrow’ however, left me floundering with a pair so toxic that for half of it is it’s akin to watching a slow-sinking ship that starts barely afloat and nosedives towards the bottom of the seabed.

If this book is partly about the dangers of drugs, mental illness and the effect of addiction, then consider the entirety of ’No Tomorrow’ a trigger-warning for those who are already frustrated by a push-pull relationship even without the heavy baggage of what Cole writes about. Because much of it’s about denial, self-pity (with the defiant refusal to want to get better) and the consequences of the ‘classic’ rocker/artistic lifestyle that destroys as much as it creates…and the people who are sucked into it with seemingly no way out until something gives. Ad nauseam.

Which pretty much describes the relationship—full of the same ups and downs and endless emotional tantrums—between Piper and Blue, who are swept into a whirlwind of destruction and false starts amidst the outsider voices that come against them.

Spanning a huge gap of 14 years, a pretty much screwed-up definition of love is what I think I got out of the end of the book instead of an epic tale of love that I thought Cole might be giving us—starting off with a protagonist who seems like a flighty flake shirking every responsibility with mood swings so sharp that it’ll slap you in the face every time and a blindly, obstinately loyal woman who never manages to let go of her naïveté about love.

The narrative is quite bloated as a result of this merry-go-round of yearning, angst and muck. In fact, I thought the story could have easily been halved and the emotional impact no lesser because of it. Objectively, I do understand the build up of romance and the slow burn that Cole wishes to write, cloistered as we are in the intimate world of Piper and Blue when they first meet and embark on that shaky relationship. I appreciated Cole’s portrayal of Piper’s own doubts about her actions, her second-guessing (which anyone with a modicum of sense would do) and her naïveté in some way, about their future, but also the part about love that’s hard—the kind that sticks around when the daily grind gets monotonous and impossible to bear.

But mental disabilities in all their forms are just plain hard. Having seen some relatives struggle with it for years, Piper/Blue’s HEA seems like a pipe dream, a quickly-resolve conclusion where for many, the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t there at all. That there’s a sweet epilogue and a romance 2 decades in the making should have given me the fluffy bunnies, but in truth, I came out feeling more exhausted than anything else.

Him He's possibly as damaged as I am. Maybe even more. Scarred just as much on the inside as the outside. Just like me. He doesn't speak. He doesn't smile. He hides in the woods like an animal. I should be scared of him. But I'm not. He's the only one that has ever made me feel. And I want to make him feel, too. Everything...

Carian Cole’s ‘Tied’ is so different from its predecessor that I don’t quite know how to rate and review this.

If Tor and Kenzi were a couple with deliciously forbidden ties, Tyler and Holly are a different breed altogether: scarred, damaged and so screwed up in the head that I thought it would take a mountain of trying just to get them together. In fact, both Tyler and Holly have issues upon issues, years of festering guilt and self-doubt and put together, their combined baggage weight would break an elephant’s back.

But like an oncoming train wreck, I couldn’t look away. The pages kept turning and the slow burn kept burning, especially when it took that long a time to get trust (and by extension, touch and intimacy) to build between 2 scarred people. Cole is quite painstakingly thorough with this process, which I could definitely appreciate and the hiccups they faced along the way seemed sufficiently realistic for me to believe. Tyler/Holly is a pairing that had me sceptical at first, but Cole does convince, to an extent, that healing can come in many forms and sometimes, that comes from another person who is as equally damaged as you.

It’s in short, a completely unexpected read, intensely emotional and bordering on the dramatic at times, but different enough that I’ll probably look at what else Cole has in store for this series.